Farmageddon: A Cattle Royale

Gameplay screenshot showing 2D, cartoony cows with name tags

Gameplay screenshot of the inventory UI, a seven-slot grid currently containing six items, ad the selected one has descriptive text at the bottom

Gameplay screenshot of the game's fall skin, with browner grass and leaves

Gameplay screenshot of the game's winter skin, with snow covering the grass and presents, trees, and snowmen scattered around

How I got involved

Farmageddon is a novel roguelike battle royale for PC for which I was the lead backend engineer. I worked as a contractor for the developer, Solidplasma Studios, led by an accomplished Twitch streamer.

The inspiration for Farmageddon was basically a joke between that streamer and one of the artists: could they design a game around cow puns. From this starting point, they had the idea of a battle royale game, where instead of players fighting each other in realtime (which he knew would be costly to implement), player actions would be recorded and saved in the cloud, then player clients would download those recordings to fight against locally.

Another artist on the team was a member of the Cleveland Game Developers (CGD) like me, and posted on the CGD Facebook page in May 2020 that his team was looking for someone who can set up a server to store and distribute json files created by a game client to other game clients via HTTP asynchronously. I expressed my interest, having worked extensively on backend systems by that time at companies like Summit Racing Equipment and OverDrive.

Beta Release

I found Solidplasma's "asynchronous multiplayer" idea pretty brilliant; it could theoretically achieve the same chaos/challenge as a realtime battle royale, without the complex networking, as long as the player recordings still "reacted" to the local player in some way, which was already being working on. So I built a cloud-based system on AWS consisting of the following components:

An API Gateway to which game clients could POST their "runs" and GET a subset of all players' runs back.
Lambda Functions to serve these requests, and S3 buckets with lifecycle policies to store/expire the player runs.

We released a free-to-play beta of the game several weeks later. This marked my first ever involvement on a game published to Steam!

Official Launch

In December 2020, I spoke again with the head of Solidplasma Studios. He described logic for selecting "bosses" that players would have to fight in the "Divine Pasture". Essentially, if a player managed to hold this area for a certain amount of time, then their run would become the new "boss", and other players would have to fight that cow (with all of its stats, items, etc.) in subsequent runs. I completed the AWS infrastructure for this system in January 2021, leading to the official Farmageddon launch on July 24, 2021!

In late 2021, I worked on some additional features, including a more complete stats/leaderboard system, tweaks to how players' "cow sprites" were associated with their previous runs, and a full In-App Purchasing system using the Steam WebAPI. My last major contribution during December 2021 was to get the entire backend system running on a single machine so that Solidplasma could demo Farmageddon through spotty internet at Super MAGFest 2022. This was the first time I ever got a client/server system to work between two physically connected machines!

While there is still occasional bug fixing to do, my involvement in Farmageddon mostly ended in late 2022, allowing me to get back to developing my own games (particularly High Hand Hold'em™).

Technical Details

I am proud of several technical details in this game:

The wide array of AWS services that I was able to utilize, including:
- AWS Lambda for custom "playback" validation logic, with SAM for local testing
- S3 to store the playback files (we also had designs for a DynamoDB-based system for better consistency, but it was never prioritized)
- API Gateway to expose the playbacks to the client GameMaker code over a REST API
- CloudWatch for logging/debugging
- EventBridge to produce automated events for cleaning up old playbacks and generating new map seeds
- CloudFormation to capture all resources in Infrastructure as Code
My thorough specifications of API request/response schemas and backend data flows, to help Solidplasma Studios (and myself) clearly understand the system before we started building, avoiding "cowboy coding"
Establishing "demo mode" as a first-party citizen within the codebase to support the Super MAGFest 2022 demo. This included using the file system rather than S3 for storing player runs, and referencing Lambda Functions through local SAM deployments rather than the Lambda service.
Learning the Steam WebAPI and building well-tested Lambda Functions for IAP inventory/purchasing
The support that I was able to provide for this game during live issues. I became very skilled with CloudWatch Log Insights queries, Metrics, and X-Ray traces to diagnose latency/concurrency issues promptly.
Building all of these backend systems on a tight indie budget. I purposely avoided costlier AWS services like RDB and ElastiCache, allowing the game to scale effectively; it cost only a few dollars per month during the early beta phase!